Surfing the Paradigm

It is said that the only constant is change. It is also said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

"Sane" persons may expect the same actions in their daily lives to reap the same reactions "forever," but they will be disappointed.

The primitive who rose early in the morning to get his pointy-ended branch and go kill something to eat was industrious and wise, for his time. If this worthy were somehow able to endure into our current age, his persistent foraging for his daily bread would become ludicrous, and would yield different results.

Western society was dominated by agriculture less than a century ago, when men sailed in wooden ships. About half a century ago, industry swelled to dominance. Less than a generation ago, service industries began to overtake industry. Agriculture is now a cryptic, almost profitless rarity, although no less crucial to the existence of industry and service.

The greatest profits are most often found in the dominant field of endeavor. Farmers tend to earn less than manufacturers, who similarly take in less than dot-com service providers and retail giants.

The lower middle and all lower income brackets are largely comprised of people clinging to the flotsam and jetsam of wrecked old paradigms. A man who spent years and dollars, and disregarded opportunities to "jump ship," so he could become a highly-paid and respected engineer, pressing out vinyl LP record albums, woke up one morning a decade ago and found himself an expert in an obsolete field.

What career paths are approaching relative extinction? There will always be nostalgia and many things old become new again, if never on a large scale. But, what fields of commerce are swelling to tower above and supplant the giant of this morning?

Predicting the future is a dubious art form at best. One near miss by an uninvited asteroid and the tidy promenade up the steps of progress of civilization can be scattered and delayed, if not ended.

Still, excepting catastrophe, it is possible to make reasonable guesses about how the wave of constant change will change the topography of the beaches we call society.

First, it has to be noted that paradigm shifts do not often occur on a simultaneous global scale. One man two millennia ago in a third world nation under foreign occupation kindled a revolution which has had as profound an impact on the species of man as anything before or since. Refinements in science and industry in "first world" nations have "trickled down" to the extent that denizens of third world nations carry cellular or satellite telephones and learn of the world by watching Fox News.

The cries of the lookout warning of submerged shoals ahead, or of the breaching of opportunity in the waves, are produced from the mouth of an American, sailing on the sea of Western technology and culture.

That stated, the saying of a sooth yet to be commences....

A relatively new buzz-word is a fine label for the fast-approaching new king of the techno-social hill. "Content."

Sometimes called "infotainment," content consists of goods or services — usually information, art or entertainment — that are transferable and, essentially, temporary. Television programming, website articles, paperback novels, music CD's and movies are common examples of content. Some content seems to endure, such as fifties television sitcoms and popular literature. Some, like "news," is severely transient.

One of the nearest extinctions is the printed newspaper. As improved as publishing technology becomes each year, no morning paper will ever be able to compete effectively with almost instantaneous news delivery by internet and television. As there will always be a demand for food purchased in a diner sitting on a round stool, there will always be a demand for a printed, portable source of information, but the ratio of diners to plastic fast-food kiosks is minor. Newspapers will continue, but only in mutated form. Except in the most centralized of population centers, newspapers will be forced to deal with less news and more opinion or research. Pulp newspapers will become cheap, disposable magazines. Some will cover "general interest" stories, while more will be focused and targeted to specific and varied audiences.

Magazines will waver between the obsolescence of the daily newspaper and the edge-riding relevance of the Internet. As the speed and resolution of computer hardware and Internet delivery spike and surge to the capacities of human sensory perception, magazines will become more costly, but will have more and larger pages and will be distributed less frequently — weeklies becoming bi-weeklies, monthlies becoming quarterlies. Probably aimed at status-conscious consumers, magazines will come to serve as inexpensive "coffee table books."

Until computer displays can deliver the printed word as easily to the human eye as ink on paper, and as silently, books will continue to exist. As things stand, only a relative handful of people can read as quickly and effortlessly from a computer monitor as from a printed page.

Once voice-recognition and synthesis become practical in real time, reading will become an eclectic skill, much like the ability to play a non-electronic musical instrument. Many people will learn and practice, but most will be happy to allow others to do so for them. This slip of the social boundaries is heavily dependent on a technological turn that is in the making, but still seems to be in the distance. Such technology must manifest in such a cheap format that appliances will carry their instruction manuals on chips inside the devices; purchasers will install the appliance and will ask it for a tutorial, and the "durable good" will simply explain to the buyer how to set up and operate the machine. When pedestrians can ask a plastic kiosk to explain the mass transit routes from that station, and a voice query can cause a computer to seek and verbally deliver the works of Shakespeare — or the latest headline news — reading will fall by the wayside. It is too slow, and relatively difficult to learn.

Education and careers in advanced computer engineering will be sound investments for a good long while, but another "industry" will eclipse computer design, manufacturing and programming as Federal Express and email are eclipsing the federal postal service.

Industry answered the demand of humanity for shorter workdays and more efficient production of needed goods. Service answered the demand of more goods to bring comfort and entertainment to the increased leisure time.

Today, information technology is preparing to answer a long-standing demand that will become a "necessity" before very long. Western man is gaining a voracious appetite for news, music, research, drama, comedy and other forms of learning and entertainment.

Five hundred satellite channels are not enough. At any given instant hundreds of thousands of people have time to watch television, but cannot find specifically what they want to watch.

Warehouse-sized discount bookstores jostle one another in even modest cities, bursting with paperbacks and magazines and calendars, yet readers want more work more frequently from their favorite authors, or in their preferred genre.

Web surfers are becoming frustrated when they can only find one or two, mediocre websites addressing their interest in an obscure aspect of information or amusement.

Music aficionados are amassing titanic libraries of work from artists old and new, and in broadening avenues of style, and yet they continue to stumble across the speed-bump of repetition. They want more from known performers, and more new work to discover and appreciate.

Three new film releases a week are insufficient for those addicted to the cinema experience. Actors enjoying the current vogue and not yet exhausted from overload may appear in three or four films a year.

Demand alone will not bring about a nation where more people are employed in the field of content-creation than any other field. Technology is applying force behind the delivery of content as well.

A decade ago, an aspiring film producer needed to get some higher education and work for an established production house for a decade before being able to influence investors to obtain even modest equipment to make an original film. Today, a junior high school drop-out with her grandmother's digicam and the iBook in her bedroom can produce a short film capable of poignancy, humor and commercial potential. This same child can upload the "short" to a website of their own design, obtain commercial sponsorship, and make more money than working part time at a video rental checkout counter. Who needs Hollywood?

Zealous, hopefully talented young people (and retirees, and disgruntled, middle-aged drop-outs) can produce and distribute original music. Who needs Nashville?

The demand for food production will continue. The need for obtaining resources to manufacture the astonishing new equipment of tomorrow will endure. Still, agriculture and industry continue to become more sophisticated in technology and technique, with fewer and fewer people being required to produce more and more resources and goods.

A welcome, if sometimes unsettling result of the looming shift to decentralized, artistic output, will be a leveling of the playing field when it comes to distribution of wealth. When a pubescent male in Rabbit Track, New Mexico, can produce a work of Photoshop "art" essentially as refined as anything wrenched from clay or smeared in oil paints, people who cannot afford five-plus-figure price tags on Dutch Masters (or contemporary masterpieces from Taos) will enter their credit card numbers for the realistically-priced, and perhaps more aesthetically pleasing work of the "kid" with the low, low overhead of living in his parent's home.

When a similar young person, or small neighborhood "gang" of such people, begin to release a monthly series of humorous, or dramatic features on the Internet, the time and money spent on following this series will be robbed from watching some of the pabulum on network television, or rental of insipid mush from Hollywood.

Revenues to Los Angeles and New York will dwindle slightly, and wax a bit more dramatically in the small towns of the "fly-over states." Middle class managerial types will be able to obtain art and education, news and entertainment of roughly the same caliber as only the wealthy could afford before. The average price of "content" will drop, although the actual quantity of consumption will increase. Distribution of profits will rise in "middle America" and will fall on the coasts.

Athletes and actors, musicians and journalists who once commanded ridiculous salaries for supplying content, will have to compete with people with much lower overhead, and in many cases, even greater talent.

And talented, non-privileged people of any race, age or creed will be able to achieve comfortable lives creating amusing and informative work for the pleasure of others. The new legions of content-creators will still need pizzas delivered, sickly engines tuned and twisted ankles repaired. But they will be better-able to afford such services, and people providing the services will see somewhat better pay. The content-creators will still need new hardware and software, replacement clothing for worn-out items, and improved versions of appliances.

The lazy, mean and misguided will continue to be with us to some degree, but as the gap between the insanely rich and the unnecessarily poor closes, and the overall need for quality manpower increases, the poverty-element in creating criminals will diminish.

As the rest of the world moves to fill in the vacated places of agriculture, industry and service, and to join in the rise of content creation, the national "balancing" of the West will begin to saturate the remainder of the world, leveling an even broader playing field.